The craziest moment of our peaceful, amazing weekend hit mid-afternoon on Saturday. There was a large group of us relaxing in the shade when all of a sudden we heard a very loud squeaking. “Snake!” Erin said, and I looked and shouted “Frog!”

There was a relatively large frog (perhaps 5″ from nose to tail) with a garter snake the thickness of my thumb (small!) latched onto its leg. The frog was facing us, screaming with all its might. Its eyes bulging with terror, its mouth as large as it could get, Squeaking! Squeaking! Squeaking! Oh lord, the squeaking.

Our guests almost immediately dissolved into varying states of freak out. The general consensus seemed to be “It’s just nature doing its thing — but oh fuck, I can’t watch this!” Many of us scattered, and I ran up to my mom and Tere’s cabin to get away from the awful frog squeaks of death. When I told my mom and Tere what was happening, their response was the opposite: “OH COOL!” they squealed, and ran down the hill to watch.

Apparently, they found Andreas with a stick trying to scare off the snake. He was quickly admonished for messing with the natural pecking order, and he soon appeared at my mom’s, shaking and sweaty, his heart racing and on the verge of tears. “I tried to save it! No one would let me!” he panted. Poor thing was seriously traumatized. Aww.

The frog death went on forever, too. Half an hour later, I went down to see what was going on, and the snake had worked its way up to the frog’s armpits. The frog had stopped screaming (but was it dead? I saw it blink!) and on an academic level it was pretty fascinating to watch how this small snake managed to inhale this frog. In. Sane. Never seen anything like it.

Luckily, all our guests were still relatively sober at this point — otherwise, the experience could have inflicted some major psychic scars.